I see the specs and i'm like "Oh! Interesting" then i see the price and i'm like "wTf is wrong with Intel?" then i remember there is no competition for them in this bracket And so the monopoly/set pricing continues...

I have been looking at these EE CPUs for the last 8 years or so and i can honestly say that i don't think the pricing "scheme" has changed at all in that time. They still want ~ $1200 for a single CPU :shadedshu

Seems to me LGA2011 is heading the way of LGA1366.
I have a feeling Intel might just axe IB-E altogether and launch a new HEDT platform based on Haswell in mid-late and leave LGA2011 out dying much like they did with LGA1366, only worse as this time as users hoping to upgrade to IB-E would have just aging SB-E to poke at.

Actually, from my perspective the LGA2011 platform ranges in price from about ~$229.99 for the Core i7 3820 on up (at least for me at Microcenter). There are also Xeon E5 processors for way less then the EE line.

I think people look at EE chips, often like what they see then freak when they see the price. I’m not saying it isn’t a justified sticker shock but clearly the product isn’t priced for you if its going to cause conniption fits.

It’s a classic case of I want the best money can buy (or high-end) but don’t want to pay for it. EE pricing has always been consistently high from what I can recall so this is nothing new.

Having said that, Intel has done there job with the lower-end LGA1155 platform very well indeed. Therefore there is a lower cost but highly powerful option and this will likely continue on the upcoming LGA1150 platform as well.

I think they tend to overestimate the TDP in some cases - like the FX-4170 with a tdp of 125W.

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First TDP has nothing to do with power drawn..it has to do with the cooling needed. very different figures, and se yes, it's going to be overstated, because when it's understated ,the chip will overheat.

Yet......

I had 3960X pull 155 W @ STOCK. Through 8-pin only.

FX-4100 STOCK 122 W.

150W is NOT that high, really a 7950 or GTX670 is like 225W, cooled with a dinky little cage fan and a cooler that is barely an inch thick.:shadedshu

150 W is NOTHING.

Now, my 3770K, at stock, pulls 50 W.

But then, I don't see many others pulling 4.6 GHz or more @ less than 1.2 V, like my chip does, although there are definitely others out there... I've seen a handful better, for sure.

Silicon quality is actually in far greater variation than most think, it seems.

Seems to me LGA2011 is heading the way of LGA1366.
I have a feeling Intel might just axe IB-E altogether and launch a new HEDT platform based on Haswell in mid-late and leave LGA2011 out dying much like they did with LGA1366, only worse as this time as users hoping to upgrade to IB-E would have just aging SB-E to poke at.

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Ivy Bridge-E is a reality so far. LGA1366 lived through two micro-architectures: 45 nm Nehalem and 32 nm Westmere. I'd imagine the same for LGA2011: 32 nm SnB-E and 22 nm IvB-E.

Is it silly that the only thing I found interesting is the black box packaging?

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I haven't bought a AMD Chip for my personal rig in a long time (FX53 personal, JUSt purchased a A8-5600k for the HTPC); But I gotta say AMD does the packaging better. Look at thos FX-8XXX boxes. So nice.

If IB-E actually launches I wonder how Ivy Bridge arch chippery can remain relevant against LGA1150 Haswell and it's Xeon counterparts that will launch before it. But ofcourse, it's another story if Haswell offers no CPU-side performance bump vs. Ivy...

Well, I got a 3820 knowing (or at least thinking that I knew,) that IVB-E was going to be coming down the road for skt2011. Intel did a good job with their 22nm chips, but I bet you they can do better. Look at SB-E over SB for example, SB-E added support for native DDR3-1600 where SB was native at 1333 and SB-E "supports" PCI-E 3.0 and plenty of it just to name a couple big ones. I suspect that IVB-E might have some Haswell-like features if SB-E was any indication.